I have decided that I would like to have a latin motto to include at the bottom of work emails as a signature. I have done several searches for online translators, but all seem to be from Latin to English, so are not much use to me. The other resources on the web seem to be dictionaries, but, as I have no knowledge of the conjugations of verbs or inflections etc., they are no use either.

So, could some very clever soul here, help me to translate the following, please?

"It's only work, so who cares?"

Thanks in advance.

Radix Malorum Est Cupiditas.

Last edited by Beobrand on Fri Jun 25, 2004 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As far as I know it may be used for either people or things; I may be wrong. You can try Perseus to see if there's a better verb.

I dropped the the verb esse (or est) in the first phrase as being understood. solum labor est feels a bit wordy to me, but is probably better grammatically.

I changed the second to be a more direct question. Somehow that seemed appropriate for office mail; I have the text speaking as if directly to the reader rather than the world at large.

HTH

- Tim

Fair points, but I really want it to be as verbose and as grammatically correct as possible, so I will keep the "est".

How do you make the question part more of a question to the world at large?

I really want it to look like some classical piece of wisdom that I have used (I work in the documentation department of a company). People will think it is some clever philosophical adage, whereas it is really stating that I don't give a monkey's!

So, we have:

Solum Labor Est, (any more ideas for the second part, much appreciated).

but that is far too close to the actual sentiment of the phrase. I interpret it along the lines of "there are more important things in life than work, such as your own personal life", though there is a little comic or ironic sense in it. the best i could come up with is along the lines of Seneca, it being a short aphorisim of the ilk he favoured so. i tried to get a rhythmic jingle into it, and thankfully the etymology bore fruit:

officium nobis in otio non in negotio sit curae.

sit being jussive, curae as a predicative dative with nobis as the dative of interest. officium here in the true sense of one's concerns in life as opposed to the rarer sense of a specific post of employment. negotium here is the closest word i could find to convey the kind of work the Roman aristocracy (whose language of course this is) would have occasionally, if ever, troubled themselves with.

whiteoctave wrote: the best i could come up with is along the lines of Seneca, it being a short aphorisim of the ilk he favoured so. i tried to get a rhythmic jingle into it, and thankfully the etymology bore fruit:

officium nobis in otio non in negotio sit curae.

I like the sound of this one (thanks for the input), but I have to say I am totally at a loss as to the exact(ish) meaning of it! Could you post a rough inverse translation of it (i.e. back into English)?

well, as i said, to construct a phrase that worked satisfactorily, i had to strop your english down to the sentiment of their being things more important than work. so the literal rendering of my trans. would be alonf the lines of: